Tomas Transtromer: New Collected Poems

Winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

"These spare, gripping poems are rooted in the landscape of the Stockholm archipelago, but reach out into a much wider world of human experioence. They make utterly compelling reading in Fulton's versions, which simply don't read like translations."Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times, Poetry Books of the Year 2011

Tomas Tranströmer is Sweden’s most important poet: his books have been translated into fifty languages worldwide. This book includes all the poems he has written in the past fifty years, including those from the Bloodaxe Collected Poems of 1987, plus three later collections: For Living and Dead (1989), The Sad Gondola (1996) and The Great Enigma (2004), and his 1993 prose memoir Memories Look at Me.

"In its delicate hovering between the responsibilities of the social world and the invitations of a world of possibly numinous reality, Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry permits us to be happily certain of our own uncertainties."Seamus Heaney

"Precisely observed, haunting, sometimes mysterious poems. They have a quality of intense concentration on the moment, the scene, the details…"Fleur Adcock

"Tranströmer is that rare thing: a non-English-language poet who has been fully accepted into British and US poetry in his own lifetime... Fulton is to be applauded for bringing into English a unique sensibility, a haunting voice, and images of such incisive clarity that they can permanently alter your perceptions."Paul Batchelor, The Guardian

“Happily, the Swedish Academy this year [2011] gave Tranströmer his long-overdue Nobel Prize. Bloodaxe had already brought out New Collected Poems in the sensitive, scrupulous renderings of Robin Fulton, supplanting previous compilations. New poems turn courageous searchlights on our being, in lines at once enigmatically spare and rich in suggestion.” Paul Binding, TLS, Books of the Year

"With captivating translations by Robin Fulton, this edition offers the perfect introduction to the growth of a poet's mind."The Independent

Tomas Tranströmer was born in 1931 in Stockholm. His awards include the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Germany’s Petrarch Prize, the Bonner Award, the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, and the August Prize. In 1997 the city of Västerås established a special Tranströmer Prize.

Robin Fulton has worked with Tomas Tranströmer on each of his collections over many years. There have been several “versions” of Tranströmer’s poetry published in English, but Fulton’s is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere.